Pursuant of my comp lit defense—and let me tell you, rarely have I produced something so indefensible—I had the pleasure of reading that extremely famous pamphlet by short-lived and, apparently, saintly communist [!] Simone Weil,
The Iliad, or The Poem of Force. Let me say that, although I'm not at all certain I agree with her wholeheartedly, McCarthy's lovely translation left me dazed with pleasure. I have excerpted some quotations, with little comment.
Still more poignant—so painful is the contrast—is the sudden evocation, as quickly rubbed out, of another world: the far-away, precarious, touching world of peace, of the family, the world in which each man counts more than anything else to those about him.
She ordered her bright-haired maids in the palace
To place on the fire a large tripod, preparing
A hot bath for Hector, returning from battle.
Foolish woman! Already he lay, far from hot baths,
Slain by grey-eyed Athena, who guided Achilles' arm.
Far from hot baths was he indeed, poor man. And not he alone. Nearly all the Iliad takes place far from hot baths. Nearly all of human life, then and now, takes place far from hot baths. (4)
By some trick of my neurology, anaphora reduces me to quivering emotional jelly. (Case in point, a
completely banal and uninteresting poem of Edna Millay's, "The Bobolink," is the only work of art ever to reduce me to tears—and, if you can believe it, does so
reliably, as if by witchcraft. The culprit? The mindnumbing, kitschy refrain "I shall never be sad again, / I shall never be sad again.") But never mind. Another:
Force, in the hands of another, exercises over the soul the same tyranny that extreme hunger does; for it possesses, and in perpetuo, the power of life and death. Its rule, moreover, is as cold and hard as the rule of inert matter. The man who knows himself weaker than another is more alone in the heart of a city than a man lost in the desert. (10)
Weil's pithiness is a world wonder—the whole essay is like this.
Pursuant of my comp lit defense—and let me tell you, rarely have I produced something so indefensible—I had the pleasure of reading that extremely famous pamphlet by short-lived and, apparently, saintly communist [!] Simone Weil, The Iliad, or The Poem of Force. Let me say that, although I'm not at all certain I agree with her wholeheartedly, McCarthy's lovely translation left me dazed with pleasure. I have excerpted some quotations, with little comment.
